With the general public unable to attend the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (held in 2021 due to the Covid pandemic), we set out to create the very best way to experience the games from afar.
Working closely with the Olympic Broadcasting Services, NBC Sports, and our technology partner Cosm we were able to develop an Oculus experience that delivered on-demand 4K, 180 and 360 video for multiple events - streamed live from Tokyo direct to living rooms across the country.
A technical paper with detail of this world first accomplishment is available from the IBC.
The app enabled groups of up to four friends to join a virtual “watch party” and enjoy live and on-demand content in perfect sync, as well as to control cameras and perspectives across the events.
The Oculus app and Tokyo Olympics content is available until December ‘21.
Watchwith was an interactive video platform I co-founded in 2002 to unlock new audience engagement and monetization opportunities from digital television. Comcast acquired the company in 2016 and integrated the technology into the Comcast-NBCU global video platform.
While at Comcast we relaunced Watchwith as the Xfinity platform’s livestreaming app to pioneer the emerging field of interactive livestreaming.
These images are some examples from a ‘21 livestream with Jamie Lee Curtis and the producer and director of Universal Pictures’ Halloween Kills. In addition, here are some further examples of how its being used: Watchwith Interactive Livestream Examples
The second to last image is the original Watchwith Showrunner tool, that allowed for rapid creative of layered temporal data, and came to life through the work of collaborators Eddie Elliot, John Fox, James Nakagawa and Simon Wolf.
The last image is an example of one of the TV-based experiences that Watchwith was used to create, in this case an extension of the Syfy Sync product to LG TVs.
My team and I made it possible for Xfinity customers to vote on their favorite prime-time shows using their voice remote. This was an extremely challenging project from both a technical and design perspective. Technically, we had to accommodate millions of real-time votes with zero margin for error. And from a design perspective, we had to make it simple and easy to use in the living room, while insuring fairness for all performers. Several seasons and tens of millions of votes later, we’re happy to have gotten it right!
Since developing this interactive capability, we’ve partnered with The Voice, America’s Got Talent, and The People’s Choice Awards to support many different combinations of voting and audience participation.
Here’s some press from initial launches for each show:
Variety
Smashcut started as on online film school, founded by my longtime collaborator and friend Daniel Blackman. The platform enables close collaboration and video making for distributed teams, blurring the lines between ‘student’ and ‘creator’.
Over the years, it has evolved into a leading collaborative learning platform with partners including NYU Film School, University of Chicago, and emerging online schools worldwide. I started as an advisor and today am on the Board of Directors.
Learn more at www.smashcut.com
Hardly Strictly is a one of a kind, annual, free music festival that takes place in iconic Golden Gate Park to the delight of over half a million fans. This three day, multi stage event features an array of eclectic bands each year from roots and Americana, to funk, rock, soul and more. I help livestream the festival and work closely with the organizers to bring new online capabilities and features to the Hardly Strictly experience.
More info about the festival at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass
The Related Content Database (RCDb) started in 2006 with the idea of creating the world’s definitive collection of time-based data around movies and TV shows, and to enable a wide range of products that could tell you “Who’s that actor?”, “What’s that song?” and more about any moment.
Working with a great team of editors and developing many custom tools, the RCDb grew to over 10,000 titles, and was used by Amazon to launch “X-Ray for Movies” in 2012.
From 2000-2005 I worked as a director and producer of live concert films and DVDs, pushing the boundaries of what was possible with interactive capabilities of multi-angle and surround sound. I had the good fortune to produce a 5.1 mix with Herbie Hancock at Skywalker Ranch, to direct Incubus live at Red Rocks, and to capture brilliant performances of artists including Santana, Trey Anastasio, Ween, Bill Laswell, & Zakir Hussein. The interactive features we developed were featured as part of DVDs from the Rolling Stones and The Who. I learned a lot about live production and the music business.
Here’s are two of my favorites as director:
The Production Lab was a 3000 sq ft. permanent interactive media installation my team and I created for the 1999 launch of San Francisco’s Zeum, now the Children’s Creativity Museum. The concept was “Mad Libs” meets MIT Media Lab, in a hands-on digital media making experience for young people.
The physical environment, custom hardware and home grown software (BeOS!) enabled kids to quickly and easily produce a show together, all while having fun and learning digtial audio, video and graphics production.
The installation consisted of three production pods (Audio, Video, & Graphics) surrounding a bluescreen stage. Bright, blinking “What’s Next” buttons delivered a producer’s instructions into visitors headphones, and then every thirty minutes, the show was dynamically assembled using the most recent contributions from the audience.
Best of all, when the countdown clocks hit zero, the lighting automatically transitioned from ‘production’ to ‘showtime’, a screen unfurled in front of the stage, and the most recent version of the show was projected for all to see and made available on the Zeum website.
Fun facts; the installation design was inspired by SFO’s jet bridge control panels (see photos at bottom), and the graphics camera is mounted to the ceiling using a bowling ball!
The Beta Lounge started in 1995 as an experiment in livestreaming electronic and DJ music that couldn’t be heard on the radio, and evolved into one of the best known music destinations on the internet, often featuring some of the world's top DJs and producers. We livestreamed weekly from the SmashTV studio in San Francisco’s dogpatch, as well as from clubs and alternative venues worldwide.
Here’s a short video of RJD2 Live at the Beta Lounge in 2006, rocking three turntables with a live audience.
In addition to the livestream, Beta Lounge was a free, weekly party and playground for video projection and experimental visuals. The original crew included Brian Benitez, Ian Raikow, David Goldberg, Jonathon Golub and Ole Lutjens. The crew eventually moved physical production to Hamburg, Germany where Ole teamed up with Niels Bacher and Heiko Jahnke to run it for the next 10+ years. Check out the archives today:
The original SF crew - Goldberg, Benitez, Raikow, Vella
DJ Spooky
Early 90's party flyer
Levi’s Engineered sponsorship flyer
The Webcast Studio was an installation my team and I developed for the San Francisco Exploratorium, as a way of connecting audiences with scientific and natural phenomena — both onsite at the museum and across the internet.
The New York Times ran a kind retrospective piece in the lead up to the 2024 total solar eclipse visible in the US.
Back in the ’90s, This Eclipse Webcast Put the Cosmos on Demand
We developed our first prototype for the Hubble Telescope repair mission in 1997, and then went on to produce live events globally including covering total solar eclipses visible in Zambia, Aruba and Turkey. The format has always included live Q&A with the audience other interactive options to engage with the the content and talent. One of our early highlights included live audience dialog with scientists that were using Hubble for research, and the opportunity to directly ask questions about their personal experience as space scientists.
The webcast studio has thrived since it was created, including development of a dedicated facility when the Exploratorium moved in 2011. The Exploratorium continues to originate educational and scientific livestream content from around the world for a global audience.
CitySpace was a pioneering virtual reality project (1993-1996) that invited kids across the internet to build an imaginary city together — and to then play within it. The project came to life as an installation and workshop at science centers and chiildren’s museums internationally, won several awards, and is recognized as one of the earliest networked virtual environments.
Technically, each installation enabled one participant in the physical world to navigate the virtual space with up to three other remote locations appearing as avatars within the world. The software enabled six degrees of freedom (6 DOF) to move throughout the virtual world, as well as realtime text chat when in proximity to other avatars. Each installation was powered by a Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine to render the real-time 3D view of the world, and multiple Macintosh II workstation to enable 3D model building.
Electric Carnival
The Internet was still in its infancy in 1994, but that didn’t stop Perry Farrell and the original Lollapalooza team from conjuring a “phreaky cyber sideshow” called the Electric Carnival. “Prepare yourself to enter into a possible vision of the world to come,” the program teased. “A world in which the machines that count our days are transformed into marvelous contraptions of creative delight.”
I was invited by the team at Interval Research to work as a producer of this Electric Carnival, especially focused on how we were going to include the Internet as part of the show. On the creative side, we focused on an experience we called the “Tattoo Server” which was a rudimentary website that allowed festival goers to share pictures and short text about their tats and piercings. (I learned a lot about piercings). On the technical side, we were one of the first to route IP over a commercial T1 circuit via KU band satellite (or at least the first non military application). Or in the words of Jim Thompson, the early IP guru who made it happen “it’ll be lossy, but it’ll work”.
The original Lolla ’94 program continued “Step inside and check out the Internet, a sprawling anarchic spider web of computers connecting people with each other and sharing information. You can play games, hang out in virtual coffeehouses, and visit entire cybercities.” Little did we know what was really coming!
The “Night Train” of tour buses, our home for the summer
